This is the same person. He signed up to run a Tor node. He also a convicted criminal. Even if you do buy the story here, people like him are probably not the best people to run Nodes. What a crazy notion: different people have different threat models. Also, the Tor network is neither a VPN nor is it "government-owned." VPNs rely on centralized trust; you have to trust the person running the VPN not to track you. Services like Tor and I2P use a decentralized trust model. Everyone running nodes and relaying your communications is a volunteer. Once you switch to a decentralized trust model, attempting to choose only the most trustworthy people to send one's data to can actually make a person LESS secure. You see this all the time. People get paranoid that those around them are out to get them, so they cut more and more people out of their lives until there is nobody left to defend or support them when something actually DOES happen to them. So what if some of the nodes are evil? Better to have a single evil node that's too scared to show it's hand than try to do everything on my own, or use a network with an objectively bad model.